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6 hypermiling cars that get over 100 miles per gallon

By Cat DiStasio Fuel efficiency is one rating that can really set a car apart from the pack. Although you can’t yet walk into just any dealership and drive away in a vehicle that gets more than 100 miles a gallon, there are some sweet rides out there that demonstrate just how incredibly efficient a car can be. To get a better idea of what the uber-efficient car of tomorrow looks like, we’ve compiled some of the most efficient vehicles on the planet, all of which exceed that 100-mpg marker. In fact, most of the cars featured here leave that rating in the dust, and several break into the quadruple digits .Slideshow-342967

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6 hypermiling cars that get over 100 miles per gallon

Stretchable square of rubber doubles as a keyboard

There’s a whole branch of science that’s dedicated to turning flexible surfaces into sensors that can be used as an artificial substitute for skin. These materials could then be used to give robots a sense of touch , or even to restore feeling for people with artificial prostheses. Researchers at the University of Auckland have taken the concept in a slightly different direction after building a square of soft, stretchable rubber that pulls double-duty as a keyboard. It’s hoped that the technology can be used to create foldable, rollable input devices, which reminds us of Nokia’s twisty-stretchy phone concept from way back when. Via: EurekaAlert Source: Smart Materials

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Stretchable square of rubber doubles as a keyboard

Tiny open-source gadget simulates replacement Amex cards, disables chip-&-PIN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHSFf0Lz1qc Hardware hacker/security researcher Samy Kamkar is legendary for his legion of playful, ha-ha-only-serious gadgets that show how terrible information security is, and now he’s turned his attention to the American Express company, which turns out to be a goddamned train-wreck. (more…)

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Tiny open-source gadget simulates replacement Amex cards, disables chip-&-PIN

Scientists use ‘spooky action’ to mail electron messages a mile

Researchers at Stanford University announced Tuesday that they had successfully leveraged the “spooky” interaction of entangled electrons to send a message between them over a span of 1.2 miles. This is by far the longest distance that scientists have managed to send entangled particles and provides the strongest evidence to date that quantum computing can have practical applications. Quantum computers exploit the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement , what Einstein famously referred to as ” spooky action over distance “, wherein two particles are connected regardless of the distance between them. That is, as in this case, if two electrons are entangled, the direction of their spin will always be the same. If one electron is spinning clockwise, the other will be too. If one reverses the direction of its spin, the other will as well. Doesn’t matter if they’re on the opposite sides of a molecule or on opposite sides of the galaxy, the two particles and their behaviors are inextricably linked. “Electron spin is the basic unit of a quantum computer, ” Stanford physicist Leo Yu said in a statement. “This work can pave the way for future quantum networks that can send highly secure data around the world.” The problem is that electrons are confined to atoms. And in order to get two electrons to entangle over long distances (and allow their quantum computer networks to communicate with one another) they need photons to act as the messengers. This is accomplished by “pairing” the photon and electron, a process called “quantum correlation”. But that runs into another issue: photons love to change the direction of their spin while travelling through fiber optic lines. So while you can get the first electron and the photon to correlate pretty easily, keeping the photon on task as it travels to the second electron is way more difficult. To overcome this, the Stanford team created “time-stamps” for the photons that act as reference points for the photons, allowing them to confirm that they arrived with the same spin orientation that they left with. Using this method, the team successfully entangled a pair of electrons over 2 kilometers of fiber optic line. Their research has been published in the journal Nature Communications . [Image Credit: L.A. Cicero] Via: Stanford University Source: Nature Communications

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Scientists use ‘spooky action’ to mail electron messages a mile

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

prisoninmate writes: The current daily build of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) remains based on the Linux 4.2 kernel packages of the stable Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, while the latest and most advanced Linux 4.3 kernel is tracked on the master-next branch of the upcoming operating system. In the meantime, the Ubuntu Kernel Team announced plans for moving to Linux kernel 4.4 for the final release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

Scientists create gold nuggets that are 98 percent air

Researchers at ETH Zurich have accomplished a bit of modern-day alchemy, transforming 20 carat gold into a lightweight foam. Well, technically it’s an aerogel: an exceedingly light and porous matrix of material. It’s so porous, in fact, that the foam doesn’t conduct electricity because, at atmospheric pressure, the gold atoms within the structure don’t actually touch. “The so-called aerogel is a thousand times lighter than conventional gold alloys. It is lighter than water and almost as light as air, ” Raffaele Mezzenga, Professor of Food and Soft Materials at ETHZ, said in a statement. Via: GizMag Source: ETH Zurich

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Scientists create gold nuggets that are 98 percent air

LG’s spending billions to make more OLED things

LG’s OLED 4K TVs are jaw-droppingly gorgeous , but the price still isn’t anywhere near the level it needs to be for mass consumer adoption . Hopefully the company’s new manufacturing plant can help that a bit thanks to economies of scale . A Reuters report says that the South Korean firm is spending some $8.71 billion (around 10 trillion Korean won) on a new manufacturing facility for the display panels in Paju, South Korea. Perhaps this can make up for some of the losses the tech giant suffered by halting production at one of its TV plants due to a gas leak earlier this year. Source: Reuters

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LG’s spending billions to make more OLED things

This crowdfunded router updates its own security

It’s really, really, really hard to make a router sound exciting , but the folks behind the Turris Omnia are betting the device’s focus on keeping your sensitive data secure might grab you. The manufacturer’s IndieGogo campaign still has 45 days to go, but it’s already proved incredibly popular: over a thousand backers have pledged some $274, 598 as of this writing. That’s 275 percent higher than the threshold for funding the project. The router itself runs Turris’ open source operating system (based on the OpenWRT project ) which auto updates as soon as any type of vulnerability is discovered by its cadre of developers. Via: Turris Source: IndieGogo

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This crowdfunded router updates its own security

Raspberry Pi Zero sells out within 24 hours

(credit: Wired) The Pi Zero—the new £4 Raspberry Pi —has sold out in under 24 hours. The Raspberry Pi Foundation says that around 20,000 individual Pi Zeroes have been sold in the last day, along with a further 10,000 copies of the MagPi  magazine which had a Pi Zero on the front. “You’d think we’d be used to it by now, but we’re always amazed by the level of interest in new Raspberry Pi products,” said Eben Upton, the founder of the foundation. “Right now it appears that we’ve sold every individual Zero we made… people are scouring the country for the last few Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury and Smiths branches that haven’t sold out [of the MagPi magazine],” Upton told Wired . Upton said they are producing more Zeroes “as fast as we can” at its factory in Pencoed, Wales, but didn’t specify when more stock would be available. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Raspberry Pi Zero sells out within 24 hours

See Ecco the Dolphin swim in a sea of animated glitches

Ecco the Dolphin was undoubtedly one of the trippiest games to emerge from the early ’90s, a psychedelic ocean adventure about Atlantis, time machines and giant crystals whose gameplay was once turned into a six-hour meditation video . But it’s never looked quite as surreal as it does in エコー ザ ドルフィン Ride the C a t a c l y s m , a series of animated gifs created by Brazilian glitch artist Sabato Visconti . Here, Ecco swims amidst jagged waves of pixel flotsam, often coming face to face with himself as he glides through a current of glitches. The series is billed as “an ongoing gif-roman of systemic failure, corrupted oceans, lush aesthetics, and sad dolphins, made with glitched out scenes from the classic Sega Genesis game.” Visconti’s previous glitch-oriented work has focused Donkey Kong Country , J. Crew catalogs , and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo . See the full gallery of Visconti’s Ecco the Dolphin glitch art here . via Kill Screen

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See Ecco the Dolphin swim in a sea of animated glitches